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Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes in The Atlantic this morning that Iran has a ‘presidential selection,’ not a presidential election.

That will come as some surprise to Iran’s 75 million citizens, many of whom have turned out today to participate in the first of what is likely to be two votes to determine who will succeed outgoing Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Moreover, the ultimate winner of the election will pay a vital role in shaping policy for the struggling Iranian economy over the next four years and, more crucially for the United States, help determine the tone that Iran will take with respect to ongoing P5+1 negotiations over the future of Iran’s nuclear energy program.

Iran’s democracy is, shall we say, less than perfect from any objective standards of democracy — Western, Islamic or otherwise.

But Dubowitz is essentially arguing that the election has no consequences:

But Iranian voters know better. The election may indicate changes in the interfactional balance of power within the regime, and a victory by [Hassan] Rouhani or [Mohammad Baqer]Qalibaf may temper the tone of the regime’s nuclear intransigence, but there will be no change in substance. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, election in reality means selection. [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei will remain in charge.

But that Khamenei will remain in charge is a coals-to-Newcastle argument. Today’s election is for president, not for Supreme Leader.

We may not like it, but the dual roles of the Supreme Leader and the Iranian president are part of the system of Iran’s government for over three decades. You can, perhaps, think of the Supreme Leader as a strong head of state and the president as the head of government. It’s perhaps easier to think of Iran’s president as akin to a prime minister — Iran had a prime minister in the 1980s, but the office ended in 1989, largely because of the overlap between the president and the prime minister. It’s arguable that Iran’s president has more independence from the Supreme Leader than, in effect, French prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has from French president François Hollande.

Perhaps Iran’s is not the most representative system, but it’s more representative than the dictator-for-life model that Hosni Mubarak effected in Egypt for three decades with the full bipartisan support of U.S. policymakers. It’s also more representative than the current system of selecting the leadership of the People’s Republic of China as well.

Dubowitz is right that there are many reasons to cast doubt on the role of the Guardian Council, a gatekeeper body comprised of 12 members, six appointed by the Supreme Leader and six by Iran’s conservative-dominated parliament. Despite hundreds of hopeful presidential candidates, the Guardian Council approved just eight candidates to run in today’s election, though two have already dropped out. The Guardian Council has never approved a woman to run for the presidency, and its dubious refusal to approve former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, a moderate seen as the best shot in 2013 for reformist-minded voters, calls into question the even-handedness of the Guardian Council.

It also refused to allow Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei to run, though many believe Mashaei’s campaign was a stalking-horse candidacy designed to provide Ahmadinejad a way to continue to influence policy despite a limit of two consecutive presidential terms.

Without doubt, these disqualifications (and Guardian Council interference in other minor elections, such as for Tehran’s city council, and in Iran’s parliamentary elections last year) call into question whether Iran’s odd style of democracy is as robust as it once was. Remember that eight years ago, the relatively unknown Ahmadinejad leapt over many more experienced rivals into the presidency on a conservative and populist agenda, and 16 years ago, reformist dark-horse candidate Mohammed Khatami won the presidency in a landslide as well. Continue reading What U.S. commentators get wrong about Iran — and why Iran’s election matters→

It’s been a fast-paced 36 hours in Iran’s presidential election, with two of the eight approved candidates exiting of the race following Friday’s third and final presidential debate.

Monday brought news that Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel would drop out of the election, reducing the number of conservative ‘principlists’ competing for votes in the first round of the June 14 presidential race. Haddad-Adel, who served as the speaker of Iran’s Islamic Consultative Assembly (Majles) from 2004 to 2008, and whose daughter is married to the son of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, did not specify an endorsement for any particular candidate, though he previously belonged to the ‘2+1 Principlist’ coalition that included former longtime foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati and Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, and his exit from the race will likely mean fewer votes spread among Velayati, Qalibaf and Iran’s current top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili (pictured above preparing for a recent presidential debate).

Today brings the news that Mohammad Reza Aref will also drop out in favor of moderate candidate Hassan Rowhani, which gives moderates and reformists a chance to unite behind one candidate. Aref, who served as communications minister and vice president under former reformist president Mohammed Khatami, allegedly ended his presidential bid after Khatami asked him to step down. Khatami has now endorsed Rowhani, who is seen as more of a moderate than a reformist. Rowhani is very close to former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was controversially disqualified in May to stand as a candidate in the current election by the Guardian Council. It’s a development that wasn’t entirely unexpected, and to the extent reformists and moderates don’t boycott the election entirely, it is very good news for Rowhani, who can try to unite to reformist and moderate camps in the hours ahead of Friday’s vote.

So where does that leave the six-candidate field? Realistically, it’s a five-man race. Though he remains a candidate, it’s hard to believe that Mohammad Gharazi could win. Although he served as Iran’s oil minister from 1981 to 1985 and as communications minister from 1985 to 1997, he’s a leftist in the mould of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who served as prime minister in the 1980s before his resurrection as a reformist presidential candidate in 2009. He’s run a campaign focused largely on economic management and controlling inflation.

The remaining five — three principlists, another independent conservative and a reformist/moderate — are not so much vying to win outright on Friday so much as vying to win one of two spots in a runoff that will be held on the following Friday, June 21 in the event that no candidate wins over 50%. If that happens, as seems likely, there’s really no way to know who will emerge in the top two spots. Though polling is not incredibly reliable in Iranian elections, a recent telephone poll by the U.S.-based IPOS indicates 57% of Iranians have not yet decided but, among those who have, Qalibaf has a wide lead of around 40% against the remaining four candidate essentially tied for second between around 10% and 20%. That generally corresponds to other field polls, though Rowhani has led other similar polls. Rowhani has led the lion’s share of unscientific online polls since the campaign began in earnest, but those are even less reliable indicators of true support.

If the first step of the Iranian presidential election was the ‘pre-qualification’ phase, and we’re currently in the second phase, the third and final phase is likely to be the whittling down of the current eight remaining candidates to just one or two major conservative frontrunners (perhaps Iran’s nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili) and one moderate candidate.

Rafsanjani’s exit from the campaign doesn’t mean that reformists don’t have options, and one of the key questions is whether reformists (and moderates like Rafsanjani) will unite behind a single candidate and, if so, who they will support and how strongly they will support him.

No one is more central to that question that another former Iranian president, Mohammed Khatami, who succeeded Rafsanjani in 1997 as a surprising dark-horse presidential candidate.

Khatami is by far the most liberal of the four major presidents of Iran’s Islamic Republic — the conservative Ali Khamenei has been the country’s Supreme Leader since 1989, Rafsanjani has always been a middle-of-the-road, moderate conservative in Iranian politics, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been a stridently conservative president, even if he’s clashed with the Supreme Leader and even though he’s been more populist than his predecessors.

Although Ahmadinejad has, in some ways, proven more successful in clawing more power for the presidency, Khatami wasn’t wholly ineffective as president. He oversaw a period of looser restrictions on freedoms in Iran, deeper engagement among Iranian civil society groups and, while U.S.-Iranian relations were not necessarily good during the Khatami era, he promoted what he called a ‘dialogue among civilizations’ between the Islamic Republic and the West.

Khatami, who openly supported Rafsanjani’s now-aborted presidential campaign, has been coy about his favorite among the eight remaining candidates. For his part, Rafsanjani has also been quiet.

Despite the rejection of the candidacies of both Rafsanjani, the current chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council, and Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, chief of staff to incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Guardian Council approved eight candidates that include both conservatives and liberals, including two figures who were part of the administration of reformist president Mohammad Khatami.

So if Rafsanjani and his supporters ultimately accept the outcome, the race won’t necessarily lack for drama or intensity. With eight candidates in the race, at least initially, the election could well go to a runoff on June 21 if no candidate wins over 50% of the vote, though there’s reason to believe some of the candidates will fall aside as conservatives in particular unite around one or two candidates.

As expected, the list doesn’t include Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, a key advisor and chief of staff to incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But the list also doesn’t include Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the original leaders of post-revolution Iran and himself a former president from 1989 to 2007, chair of the Expediency Discernment Council, and a former presidential candidate in 2005 as well. Rafsanjani’s rejection wasn’t exactly unexpected, but it has the potential to make the 2013 presidential election already as politically explosive as the 2009 presidential election, when Ahmadinejad won a victory that supporters of his opponent, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a former Iranian prime minister in the 1980s, who ran as a reformist candidate with the support of former reformist president Mohammad Khatami.

The Guardian Council is a 12-member council that vets presidential and parliamentary candidates and otherwise serves as Iran’s final constitutional interpretative body. Its decisions are widely seen as a means of extending the interests of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei (pictured above), given that half of its members are appointed by the Supreme Leader and the other half are appointed by the Iranian parliament, which is dominated by Khamenei’s conservative (or ‘principlist’) supporters.

While Rafsanjani himself wasn’t part of the ‘Green movement’ that challenged the election results, Rafsanjani gently chided Iran’s regime for its harsh and sometimes lethal crackdown, which included jailing many activists and journalists, curtailing freedom of assembly, speech and the press, and resulted in the house arrest of both Mousavi and another reformist presidential candidate, Mehdi Karroubi. Although Rafsanjani lost the chairmanship in 2011 of the Assembly of Experts, he remained the chair of the Expediency Council.*

Rafsanjani, a sometimes-ally and sometimes-rival to Khamenei, dominated Iranian politics in the 1980s alongside Khamenei. Rafsanjani was the speaker of Iran’s parliament when Khamenei was president. When Iran’s first Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini died in 1989, the Assembly of Experts chose Khamenei to succeed him, but Rafsanjani quickly won the first of two terms as president, therefore extending their dual dominance of Iranian politics through the end of the 1990s. Given that Rafsanjani is the most powerful politician in Iran after Khamenei, he would have had the credibility and legitimacy as Iran’s president to challenge the principle authority of the Supreme Leader.

There are essentially three potential outcomes from here:

Rafsanjani accepts the decision, reformists back another candidate.

Rafsanjani could simply accept the Guardian Council’s decision, call on his supporters to back another candidate, and the election will proceed without Rafsanjani. Given his relatively cautious and conciliatory past, this may well be the most likely outcome, especially if Rafsanjani, Khatami, Mousavi and others rally around one of the remaining candidates approved by the Guardian Council, not all of whom are necessarily conservatives. Although five of the eight candidates are ‘principlist’ conservatives who are clearly loyal to the Supreme Leader and unlikely to challenge Khamenei’s imperative, the Guardian Council approved Rafsanjani’s former communication minister, Mohammad Gharazi, as well as the chief nuclear negotiator during the Khatami administration, Hassan Rowhani. The Guardian Council also approved Khatami’s former vice president, Mohammad Reza Aref, who will be the most pro-reform candidate of the eight.

Rafsanjani appeals for Khamenei’s intervention.

Rafsanjani could initially challenge the Guardian Council’s decision and call upon Khamenei to step in to allow his candidacy. That’s not unprecedented — in 2005, Khamenei intervened to request the Guardian Council approve two reformist candidates that it had previously rejected. If Rafsanjani does go to Khamenei, and Khamenei ultimately assents to the request, it would allow Rafsanjani to run while also demonstrating in a very public way Khamenei’s dominance. If the presidential drama plays out this way, it wouldn’t be surprising at all — Rafsanjani remains a candidate, but he’ll owe his candidacy to the goodwill of the Supreme Leader.

Rafsanjani’s supporters boycott the election — or take to the streets.

If Rafsanjani or his supporters don’t accept his rejection, however, it could become very difficult very quickly for Khamenei. If reformers and moderates boycott the election, it would be a significant setback to a regime that hopes to turn the page from the 2009 election, its violent aftermath and the antics of the Ahmadinejad administration. If Rafsanjani’s supporters take to the streets in a way that’s even vaguely reminiscent of the 2009 ‘Green movement,’ it would be difficult for Khamenei to effect another election-related crackdown, especially against Rafsanjani, who was one of the leading figures of the revolution’s first generation. Khamenei lost credibility both in Iran and abroad with the 2009 crackdown, but to take on Rafsanjani would amount to nothing less than a street war between Iran’s two top revolutionary figures at a time when Iran’s economy and its position in the world hang precariously in the balance. Continue reading Rafsanjani, Mashaei both disqualified from running for Iranian presidency→

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Suffragio attempts to bring thoughtful analysis to the political, economic and other policy issues that are central to countries outside of the US -- to make world politics less foreign to the US audience. Suffragio focuses, in particular, on those countries and regions with upcoming or recent elections.